50 Years of Pulsars

06 Sep 2017

Jodrell Bank celebrates the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first pulsar

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first pulsar by Anthony Hewish and then-Phd student Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at The University of Manchester is hosting a major conference to celebrate this landmark discovery, with over 200 astronomers from all over the world expected to converge on the award-winning Discovery Centre at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the shadow of the iconic Lovell Telescope, and a short distance from the Square Kilometre Array headquarters.

‘Pulsars are the compact leftover of massive stars that exploded at the end of their lives’ explains Prof Ben Stappers from The University of Manchester, who is co-chair of the event. ‘They are the fastest naturally spinning objects known in our Universe and produce very narrow beams of light, which makes them appear to blink like lighthouses when we observed them with radio telescopes’.

Participants at this International Astronomical Union Symposium will discuss some of the major achievements of the last five decades, recent research breakthroughs and future directions for this field of astronomy, which, among other things, has been responsible for testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity on multiple occasions and is credited for the discovery of the first planets outside our Solar System.

‘It will be a unique experience to have some of the most influential scientists who have studied pulsars since their discovery and the younger generation making their first exciting discoveries under the same roof’ say Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell who co-discovered the first pulsar, now visiting professor at Oxford University and co-chair of the science organising committee for the event. 

Some of the highlights to be expected from the week include the discovery of pulsars situated at opposite ends of the scale: the two slowest spinning pulsars ever found, and the fastest spinning pulsar located in the field of our Milky Way Galaxy -- the second fastest overall. Other fascinating results to be announced will be the discovery of a pulsar orbiting another star in what is the most elongated orbit found in such binary system so far, as well as new tests of Einstein’s General Relativity enabled by a pulsar in orbit with two stars at once.

The 50 Years of Pulsars conference will kick off on on Monday 4th September with the planting of a ‘White Star’ crab apple tree and ‘Woodland Star’ daffodils by the participants as a permanent memorial on the site of Jodrell Bank, where the Lovell Telescope has played a key role since just after the initial discovery.

Members of the public will also benefit from the visit of of Prof Joel Weisberg at the conference, who will give a public lecture on Wednesday 6th September about the history of pulsars. Prof Weisberg is a leading figure in the field, having contributed to some of the original research that revealed the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves.

The 50 Years of Pulsars IAU 337 Symposium has received generous funding from the International Astronomical Union, RadioNet3, the Square Kilometre Array organisation and The University of Manchester.